GFCF Annual Report, 1 April 2024 – 31 March 2025
This GFCF Annual Report covers the period 1 April 2024 – 31 March 2025. Over the year we at the GFCF continued our work supporting our community philanthropy partners through our grantmaking, connecting the field and building its evidence base, and building a global movement to #ShiftThePower. This Annual Report provides a sense of how we have approached this over the period.
A key highlight was the formation of our Measuring What Matters action learning group, made up of 22 GFCF partners from 17 countries. In recent years, within our community we have witnessed not just a growing interest in how to measure value in locally-led development, but also a deepening sense of possibility and of alternative approaches. The group met twice in-person and convened frequently online, and were able to build strong, trust-based relationships, to challenge extractive evaluation systems and to test emergent, grounded ways of measuring “what matters”, rooted in shared values of trust, agency, dignity and collective power.
Early 2025 brought a profound disruption to the system of global development cooperation, with the abrupt and brutal dismantling of USAID and the Inter-American Foundation. We recognized that the suddenness of the action had harmful impacts across some organizations in our network and the communities that they serve. In the early days of the USAID cuts, we convened a series of online drop-in sessions. These brought together organizations that had lost considerable amounts of funding with others who had not been directly affected but who nonetheless showed up in solidarity and support. Amid the confusion and uncertainty, what stood out most strongly in these and in subsequent meetings was a shared sense of resolve. The aid freeze has sharpened, beyond dispute, the case for alternative resourcing strategies for civil society, including and especially community philanthropy, which can ward against the changing priorities of external funders and limit the power that they wield.
Published by: GFCF
Published: January 2026